When Charles Darwin made his famous round-the-world voyage he made many observations of geological processes. In Chile he felt a very strong earthquake and described it as follows:

"A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over fluid; one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced."

Charles Darwin, 1860
The Voyage of the Beagle

While many people throughout history have reflected on the mobile nature of the Earth's surface, one of the first scientists to put forward a well-documented proposal for the large-scale motion of continents was a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener. He compiled various lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis that all of Earth's continents had been assembled as a single "supercontinent" approximately 250 million years ago. He named this supercontinent Pangea, which is Greek for "all lands." One piece of evidence that Wegener used was the fit of the coastlines on either side of the Atlantic. He made maps showing how Africa and South America could be fit together, and all the other continents as well.

Go ahead and test Wegener's hypothesis yourself. Can you reconstruct Pangea?

QUESTIONS:
Did you have trouble making your reconstruction? Why? What are some additional considerations or pieces of information that would be useful for your reconstruction to be more robust or more accurate? Make a list of both (1), issues related to the map that we are using here, and (2) additional scientific information that would be useful to have.

When you made your version of Pangea, did any of the continents change latitude or did you simply move them side-to side, changing only their longitude? If any continents did change latitude, which ones? What implications does a change in latitude have for the fossils that you might find on these continents?